What Thomas Jefferson meant

To the Editor,

I am writing this in response to the letter in the July 10 Swarthmorean entitled “Happy birthday, America.” My hope is that this will engender thoughtful and engaged discussion.

The letter, as I experienced it, is exemplary for the writer’s (I assume) unconscious refusal to examine events, learn from them, and challenge himself and others to confront racism and policies that support inequalities on the basis of race, gender, and so on.

It could be useful to parse the entire letter, but in the interest of brevity I skip to the last two paragraphs in which Thomas Jefferson is quoted: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” Mr. Smith holds these words up with the hope that we will determine if they mean what “we hope Jefferson meant them to mean.”

The problem is that we know perfectly well what Jefferson meant by those words. He meant whites, specifically white males.

We must all examine our “statues” and come to grips with them. Thomas Jefferson never felt that Black men or women were created equal with whites, and he often spoke of them as inferior. He demonstrated his self-evident truth by owning slaves and treating them with great brutality.

If we wish to be part of a solution, we must acknowledge the problem. Racism is not simply a matter of those who seek to lynch and murder. It can often be more subtle and insidious.

Pretending that America was not created with racism openly and purposefully enshrined in the democratic institutions is itself a racist act. It continues to pervade in various forms (perhaps not always intentionally) in every system that exists, from the police to schools to the legal system, and so on.

Racism exists in each of us when we fail to examine closely the import and results of the policies we support, the heroes we adore, and fail to listen closely and with an open mind and heart to peoples whose voices have never been adequately heard in society.

Mr. Smith, I believe you can do better. I believe we can all do better.

Black Lives Matter. If anyone shrinks from the statement because “all lives matter,” please open your ears. We who chant Black Lives Matter do so in full knowledge that All Lives Matter. It is just that, in America, Black Lives have never fully Mattered.

Carl Chenkin
Swarthmore